Post-Review

What is your opinion of this {idea, book, product, system, media, economy, year, decade, culture}? Any recommendations?

As trends 2.010 go, scifi is in hiatus. Party-goers are served irony and ice. Stereotypes trump sensibilities. Eastern projections edge UK, Orwellian that is. Yoda yields to literature and art, but gweilo/gaijin/gringo groundwork needs improvement. Sustainable sites seek alternative to ads.

In the meantime, can record recent changes in how one sees (or hears) along the route to a review. There are more permutations than only prof, PC, and professional society. Lessons learned from the trials of Test Information Space include how the gentle reader can comment and collaborate on CMS and socnets, and plan professional projects.

Can briefly consider Q&A in this context.

How do you write a review? Tweets tend to be punchy. Blogs have more beats per minute. Reports are arranged for defense. Point out:

• the purpose,
• how well it was achieved,
• use cases,
• tips,
• constraints,
• comparative approaches,
• suggestions for improvement, and
• constructive conclusions.

How has reading changed? Ebooks can be skimmed rapidly multiple times for gist and memorization. Search is selective. Metadata is maintainable. Notes are navigable. Socnets provide second opinions.

What are types of reviewers? Casual users provide a personal experience, experts extrapolate from datapoints and error bars, researchers rank and emphasize additional efforts, and paid reviewers repeat the party line.

How has consumption changed? May buy something to blog about, evaluate embargos, elect extradition, or bargain-hunt banned brands.

Where do you find good reviews? This is user-specific. List favorite feeds. Ask friends, e.g. Facebook. As always, desire access to original data.

Turns out that the ability to sense something implies that it has already been cognitively categorized so, if in doubt, one can always sleep on it. Otherwise just cast a keyword, e.g. whodunit.

Also see review.

Where’s the pi?

The mobile market is more than a moving target. Its shape is a multiple derivative of other fields. Developments of social industry rise from the rubble of institutional distortion. Where’s the i? Place becomes space for work, learning, entertainment, performance, and studio, in addition to test.

A simple generative case is to prefix tags by the world “mobile”. For example, a mobile social mind map may be a topology of location-based ideas. Mobile web sites, social browsers and p2p become self-assembling talents that can meet challenges in realtime. If the web was like a database that made organizations smarter, then mobile is a counterpoint for a work-on-demand goto-grid. Comms reduce the need for travel. Implants disappear the devices. Software radio is no longer in sight.

Browse this domain for developments that expand the xy axis. Markup and scripting provide easy customization. Mesh dashboards meter distributed databases. Pictures are parsed to extract numbers and text, count objects and list scenic metadata. Search permeates the web/world barrier. Answers are always in hand. Carrying a truth detector puts one in mode of integrating intentions in addition to behaviors. Biometrics make diagnosis and prescription relevant to living outside the clinic. Similarly for security watchdogs seeking outlaw autopilots beyond airports. The phone is good for decoding, network switching, software development, project management, and scientific instrumentation.

As a broad brush, immediate phases build out the context via plug ins for calculation, office, web, 2.0, semantic, sensor, ebooks, media, translation, navigation, lifestream, augmented reality, virtualization, mining and mcommerce. Measurement is constructive.

Historical Sitemap

 

Economies value what seems rare or in short supply. This was true for goods and services where innovations such as the light bulb and automobile resulted in utilities and industries for production and service.  A decade after the dot-com boom, boutique browsers offer an app for that, a time-shared tradition taken from Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo and Google who initiated growth in the sale of digital commodities and supporting infrastructure and are now being dittoed across the developing world.

A popular term for the digital economy is electronic commerce or e-commerce where marketplace has become market-space, unique selling position (USP) is the market niche, URLs are non-English, and e-business plans include ads for pay-per-click programs. Properties of content, process and intellect have new forms of substance and protection. Trade secrets is an open-source maxim. Users from anywhere place a new world order met by universal sourcing and distribution via cyber cash transactions. Noobs scramble for the next offering or spin-off, regional, specialized, or customized.

This can be disruptive for the powers that be who have invested their family or state’s wealth in physical assets and accountants. Since the scale defies most  known forms of manipulation, challengers earn immediate word-of-mouth street rep across the industry game and a brief ‘pinion din. Predictions for the new year are that mobile, socnets, web2.0 and semantic web will embrace the enterprise as they have grasped government. Usability is a predictive factor which correlates user experience, quality of service and popularity. TIS the season for surprises.

Also see wiki for link feed, documents and books.

7 up

Upgrade was straightforward for win 7 home edition 32-bit on an XP dual-boot laptop. After backing up previous data files and defragging, used GParted from an ImgBurn’d DVD to split partition into pair. Downloaded three OS files from web, Win7-HP-Retail-en-us-x86.exe 69.8MB, setup2.box 137.6MB and setup1.box 2GB, then installation to the new clean logical drive took about half an hour. Wireless internet access was easily restored. Aero is supported by graphics card. The PC now boots to win7 by default or previous XP by selection. Win 7 documents can be edited from XP login, but reverse situation is prevented from seeing or editing other user’s contents. Workaround is to use a common area which does not require permissions, e.g. \temp. Word .doc files are not recognized on native win7, so saved as .rtf. Used a notes file and cell phone as dashboards for activity log, clips and comments; web editor is another alternative. Third party apps have to be reinstalled and checked for compatibility. The system displays a dialogue box once for each program to verify that it will be allowed disk access. IE8, Firefox and Chrome browsers imported bookmarks from respective exported html’s okay. Live writer was used for this blog. Evernote 3.5 added a new entry okay. Adobe Reader 9 installed and was able to look at a couple of PDF files. There are more apps to reinstall and verify. Stored MP3s play. An external USB disk is accessible; backup of 40.54GB took about 50 minutes.

Progressive Regression

Assume for a minute that forecasts of a cloudy web are true. Enterprises enter a refactoring phase which complements phones replacing PCs amid meetups instead of meetings. More extreme cases result in, not just paperless office, but officeless professions, education and government. The schizophrenic screen that has spent half the time on work and the other on web2.0 then solidifies seamlessly. In the future tense, it is likely that there are applications where the cloud is useful at an acceptable threshold of trust.

Data volume being like a tornado that sweeps over engines of search, classification and computation, a data mining booster may help find direction again, and test data analysis may establish course correction. Tools have found their way onto PCs and networks in the QA, agile and open-source cases. Components can be customized to run off of portable media such as flash drive or CD, USB or P2P, browser plugins, and phone apps. The next exercise is to establish stable, sustainable and scalable eQuality. For example, a mashup of templates from TIS and cloud would vector versions of testability metrics, virtual toolsets, testing-as-a-service, cloud under test, and analysis on demand. Depending upon the cultural or commercial context, they may tend more to either social or automated implementations.

This potentially adds new mosaics to dashboards that are now limited to notes, feeds, reviews, wikis, communications, activities, spreadsheets, and media. Cumulative captains of industry can derive further case studies, cluster BOMs and business plans. Test teams may widen their range and discover unmet needs and niches as tech has a tendency to do. Exceptions to the cloud pivot toward continuing efforts at clearing constraints.

Location/location/location

In order to add depth to a discussion of visualization, verification and validation, take a snapshot of 3D CAD. Digitized renditions of places, appliances and actors result in a natural interface that exploits user capacities for mobility, navigation, and prediction. Identification, position and metadata are features of the framework. Models may vary in definition, accuracy and manageability, but tend to benefit from the web trends of linking, collaboration and interoperability. A brisk pace of improvements adds user designs to more situations over time such as conference, games and science. Time itself is a parameter in this context since it can be represented as an axis, cycle, or movie-like special effects. It can alternatively be transformed into other mappings such as durations, derivatives, or distributions. Slices of depictions can be juxtaposed for comparison, interaction or animation. (Okay, okay, okay, the triplets theme is becoming trying.)

Familiar applications include architecture and vehicle manufacturing. Design costs are lower since versions can be exercised and discarded without waste. Users are watching more video and doing more drawing on tablets or touchscreens. They do photography on webcams or phones which also have built-in GPS and compass. Symbolism is second nature via avatars in virtual worlds and augmented reality. Graphics run locally or on distributed platforms using flash. CAD adds a degree of control to a world where surveillance seems to witness chaotically runaway effects, and invites efforts to find ways to turn more information into knowledge. Models themselves form a datawarehouse which can be used as reference. This is useful when the scales approach infinity, e.g. nano or cognitive. As consumers expect more 3D video, CAD branding becomes generally applicable.

Also see resource links 3D CAD.

Onto Log

Business’ heaps of communications and records contain knowledge that is often needed but are lost and inaccessible. There is a class of database known as enterprise content management (ECM) created as a solution. These systems add features such as discovery of material relevant to a query, derivation of workflow models, and flexibility of administrative interfaces such as datawarehouse dashboards. They apply lessons learned from web2.0 collaboration and networking. software development such as opensource and SaaS, and hardware implementation for mobility, scalability and virtualization.

Well-known players in this field include Microsoft Sharepoint, EMC Documentum, IBM Filenet P8, Oracle 10gR3, Autonomy Interwoven, Open Text Vignette, Alfresco and Nuxeo. Selecting the right type of system and vendor is crucial for successful implementations, so quality assurance approaches become relevant. Besides expense, differences include ability to convert hardcopy to digital storage, migration from legacy systems, and interoperability between vendors.

The proposed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard is an attempt to agree upon a uniform export protocol.

Hopes are balanced by concerns about preservation, privacy, security and future-proofing as in transitions of other types of operational and archival community records such as medical, scientific, library, financial, utilities and government. Test content management is a subject of interest to this blog.

For further details, see wiki and resource bookmarks.

Image: Noah’s Ark

Instant Virma

“It prospered strangely, and did soon disperse
Through all the earth:
For they that taste it do rehearse
That virtue lies therein”,

George Herbert, Peace, 1633.

In this case the wide-spread subject is virtualization. This makes a computer or storage system look like many to its users. Popularity is due to the costs and power saved by not having to load up on hardware, often to meet a temporary peak demand, and the agility in fielding appropriate infrastructure and applications. Sometimes it is as easy as drawing a capacity plan and having the hypervisor and virtual machine monitor assemble the hardware emulation software automatically on hosted servers, tuning each virtual machine (VM) instance’s portion of resources such as processor instruction cycles, memory or bandwidth for proper load balancing.

The techniques sprang from time-sharing, portable OSes, and redundant storage devices. Of course, hardware was also often developed using simulation and functionality implemented in firmware. Now the bare metal can host a layer which mimics popular processor, memory, I/O, and network switch architectures so that off-the-shelf applications can run anywhere, operating system optional, and migration is easier. This is offered for servers, desktops, phones and data centers. The approach spans cloud, grid, parallel and high-performance computing (HPC) systems. Vendors include VMWare, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Cisco and many others. There are open-source versions which lower cost further if vendor support is not necessary, e.g. Xen and KVM. Hardware may also have virtualization built in as a multiplier and for compatibility to a variety of interfaces, for instance.

System management is significant since integration issues are likely and software may require licensing. A virtual machine often has to reboot when a bug causes a crash, but the rest of the VMs run intact. Version changes introduce risk. Infrastructure patches cause side-effects to virtual apps. It is possible to mix various ratios of physical and virtual components. Performance may be adversely affected by additional virtualization layers. VM sprawl makes end-to-end administration more difficult. The visibility and testing tools need improvement. Standard quality measures can still be taken, such as use cases, architectural review, and measures of functionality, usability, security, scalability and performance. Benchmarking in VMs may have time drift.

Users, developers and administrators can expect to see this topic expand as more virtual appliances are developed. Here is an example introductory Glossary.

Also see bookmarks. Tags can be combined as subtopics, e.g. taxonomy or test. A sampling of additional literature on virtualization and grid computing is shown below.

Books:

• Cloud Security and Privacy, by Tim Mather and others, 2009, 336pp, grid computing.
• Running Xen: A Hands-On Guide to the Art of Virtualization, by Jeanna N. Matthews and others, 2008, 624pp, grid computing.
• Virtualization for Dummies 2007 by Bernard Golden. Trends: hardware is underutilized, data centers run out of space, energy costs go through the roof, system administration costs mount.
• Practical Virtualization Solutions: Virtualization From the Trenches 2009, rough cut, by Kenneth Hess and Amy Newman 336pp.
• The Best Damn Server Virtualization Book Period by Rogier Dittner and David Rule 2007, 500pp.
• Storage Virtualization: Technologies for Simplifying Data Storage and Management, by Tom Clark 2005, 264pp, grid computing.
• The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise, by Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher 2009, 500pp, grid computing
• Crimeware: Understanding New Attacks and Defenses, by Markus Jakobsson and Zulfikar Ramzan, 2008, 608pp, grid computing.
• Hadoop: The Definitive Guide, by Tom White 2009, 528pp, grid computing.

Documents

• A View of the Parallel Computing Landscape, Asanovic and others, Comm of the ACM, October 2009;
• Virtualization Trends, Option and Adoption, Achleman 2008
• Understanding Full Virtualization, Paravirtualization and Hardware Assist, vmware 2007

The Stream of Scientific Revolutions

Due to social and sensor networks, it is estimated that data volume is doubling every 9 to 12 months. Analysis is required in realtime to derive knowledge from distributed databases. Awareness is improved by adding sources, e.g. the internet of things. The term data mining, reportedly coined by Robert Hecht-Nielsen a couple of decades ago, denotes automated fact-finding, knowledge discovery, rule inference and prediction activities. The field follows predecessors such as statistics, originally named for state demographics and economics, and machine learning. ACM dedicated a knowledge discovery and data mining group, KDD, in 1989.

In classic science, a hypothesis is often disproved by experiment, whereas in this case, tests yield a data-driven hypothesis. Patterns of interest are useful or novel, though most are not. More recently, the field picked up steam as analysis times for huge databases became excessive, disparate sources needed to be quickly connected and dimensionality, or number of attributes, expanded. These result in ways to assign meaning which leads to knowledge which is communicated as information assuming that errors are avoided or corrected. The result is better visualization and built-in database intelligence.

Government and security have been major proponents, e.g. for profiling. Other applications include biomed, insurance, physics, business intelligence, CRM, information retrieval, OLAP online analytical processing, text mining and analysis, finding experts, sports stats, and digital libraries. Besides software, tools include decision trees and neural networks. Models may be verified by splitting the data and verifying the equivalence of results on both parts.

Major tasks have been outlined as:

• classification, sequence detection, genetic algorithms, nearest neighbor, naive bayes classifier, logistic regression and discriminant analysis;
• affinity analysis, market basket, association analysis, rule learning, rough sets, and sequence detection;
• prediction, regression, and time series analysis forecasting;
• segmentation, cluster analysis, and kohonen networks;

A couple of the popular standards are CRISP-DM, cross industry standard process for data mining, and PMML, predictive model markup language.

There is plenty of software such as R, SAS SEMMA for sample explore modify model assess, SPSS, Netbase, Statistica, opensource Labkey, Rattle GNOME GUI, GNU octave, Weka-3, Apache Hadoop, Datalogic/R, Mozenda scraper. IBM, Oracle and Microsoft have offerings.

Other than usability, system integration and projections from prior knowledge, issues commonly revolve around privacy and performance. Congress has discussed consumer protections, though users are tracked from an increasing number of government social-network sites and cloud security standards are still in development. Data may be missing. Patterns may not be understandable. Noisy data can result in spurious patterns, though source correction is improving. Relationships between fields may be more complex than assumed.

Kdnuggets is a general resource site.

Also see bookmarks for media links.

Dili-ology

To a digital library, all readers are scholars. At least users develop smoother knowledge interaction skills. There is no foraging in the stacks and waiting in line at the tall desk for someone to do book checkouts, indicate what’s relevant or where it might be hidden. New ideas can be discovered through links between material. Excerpt streams raise interest. Like testers, readers can get to original data from which conclusions are drawn, e.g. electronic records. Librarians or teachers may leverage a set of reader proxies to serve wider audiences. Filters deliver timely and flawless content to each customer. A miniature copy of the world’s information can also be carried on person for those who prefer an old school approach.

As in heavy metal, paradise or perdition is subjectively layered. This entry’s title might describe devotees of a cousin to the previously discussed Hali world of immersion or augmentation for seekers of the perfect portal, lens or cave. Those who prefer fiction may find a wider range of levels. some noticing hints of a precursor to singularity where Q&A email or messaging is a type of Turing test for content analysis and sources.

What are some examples of a digital library? They’re more than just notes and quotes:

• WDL has an international museum collection that features a time slider to change the date range from 8000BC to present.
• Google books has public literature.
• Papercube visualizes the domain of academic papers.
• DigitalGlobe offers high-resolution geospatial imagery for sale.

In addition to concepts, digital library artifacts cover books, documents, podcasts, music and video recordings, art, news, databases, software, taskflows and messages. Digital rights management (DRM) prevents fraudulence and can limit the number of simultaneous copies, whole or partial, where necessary for payment. Private libraries can be implemented, e.g. for educational exploration. A digital library can also be embedded in the web and vice-versa. This becomes interesting when one considers that present web search engines or wikis already offer language localization and translation, web2.0 has bookmarks, annotations, reviews, rankings, recommendations, search wikis, creative commons and mashups, and semantic web has taxonomies, ontologies, datamining and linked-data.

Library classifications include at least the size of collection, purpose, users, implementation, features, interaction, media types, and errata or known issues, e.g. structural or tested. User roles encompass readers, authors, librarians, publishers, artists, and critics. Faculty and students are also contained in this set. Purposes have not been exhausted, but so far have comprised cultural archives, research, documentation, academic or learning management system (LMS), business and personal entertainment. Implementations span the gamut of IT from software, to internet or cloud, and devices including mobile ereaders, laptops, phones and netbooks.

A key feature is digitization of data, metadata and processes. An example is books scanned into storage. Accessibility aids may convert these to another language, large print, audio or braille. Details and topics are indexed for multimedia browsing or search guides. Details can be summarized for outlines. Data calculations can be performed. Answers can be derived upon request or realtime alerts can be sent to interested parties when relevant information appears.

Speed reading techniques can be adapted. Rapid skimming loads preconcious representations (though may trigger site autodownload blockers in extreme cases). Mnemonics can be filled in, e.g. by repetition, outlining, and cues. Historically this involved  poetry and pictures. Now there are also hyperlinks, tag clouds, and storyboards.

Issues are legion. The digital divide needs to be conquered. Copyright involves negotiation as demonstrated by the book rights registry resulting from the Google settlement. There are tradeoffs involving cultural identities when collections merge, e.g. the library of (party) congress. Censorship is an ancient barrier in modern guise. There are need-to-know limitations for safety or security. Sponsors may have agendas. Some material may not be digitized. Where media is cultural memory, unrepresented items cease to have ever existed which affects government legislation based upon official research. Misinformation techniques exist for revisionism, tampering or spoofing. Surveillance can be excessively pervasive, e.g. reading lists used to label (literary) agents. Datawarehousing concerns apply, e.g. synching copies to sources. Users have to distinguish between appropriateness of specialized and general-purpose devices. We can further evaluate qualities such as preservation, usability, findability, accessibility, performance, scalability, quality of service, interoperability and sustainability.

Also see bookmarks.

Image: Buddha’s Kindle.